Pretoria, 04 Dec 2007
IT services and solutions provider Datacentrix has signed an agreement with wide area data services (WDS) solution provider, Riverbed Technology, to resell the company`s Steelhead products, becoming a certified partner locally.
Riverbed`s Steelhead WDS product range addresses the issues that affect application performance over the WAN, dramatically improving the performance of applications that companies and knowledge workers rely on every day - including file sharing, e-mail, backup, document management systems and IT tools, as well as ERP and CRM solutions.
With Riverbed`s solutions, any of these applications can be accelerated somewhere between five and 50, and even up to 100 times faster.
Today, more than 2 500 organisations worldwide have selected Riverbed and deployed the company`s Steelhead products, at sites ranging from oil rigs in the South China Seas and submarines in the Atlantic, to remote offices and headquarters sites in Vladivostok, Osaka, Seoul, London and New York City.
Additional problem areas addressed by Riverbed`s Steelhead appliances include:
* Insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into remote offices;
* Difficulties in IT consolidation; and
* Challenges with slow remote data backup and replication.
"In very simple terms, the impact for companies using Riverbed`s solutions is the difference between having dial-up and having broadband," says Christo Briedenhann, regional sales manager at Riverbed. "Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible, just like that."
WDS encompasses several different product categories. Whether an organisation is seeking to make the most of its existing investment in WAN bandwidth by reducing traffic, or aims to accelerate the performance of its global applications by addressing latency and chatty protocols, the optimal solution addresses all aspects of the problem at once.
WDS is the superset of several existing categories, including:
* Application acceleration;
* WAN optimisation;
* Wide area file services (WAFS);
* QOS and traffic shaping; and
* Web caching.
"Unlike these individual approaches that only address a single cause of poor application performance across WANs, a complete WDS solution enables the benefits of all of these approaches within a single, unified architecture," Briedenhann explains. Using WDS, enterprises can improve application performance across the network typically by five to 50 times, and in some cases, up to 100 times, and can reduce WAN bandwidth utilisation by 65% to 95% simultaneously. These dramatic results allow businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure and applications in ways that they had never imagined possible.
Briedenhann maintains that Datacentrix`s national footprint was a key consideration for the relationship with Riverbed. "Because Riverbed does a significant amount of work through its partnership network, a strong technical team that can execute large roll-outs across South Africa was necessary.
"Datacentrix`s solid BEE credentials, critical for business in South Africa, were also important, as were its sound customer relationships with top companies across the country. It is important to be able to get the customer, service provider and vendor all in line with one another and we believe that between Datacentrix and Riverbed we can create happy customers for the long-term."
Duncan van Jaarsveld, Business Unit Manager of Networking, states that the relationship with Riverbed forms part of Datacentrix`s organic growth strategy, in that the company is always seeking new areas of technology to complement its existing offerings and meet customers` evolving needs. "Infrastructure consolidation has become a natural growth area for us and in investigating market offerings, we found that Riverbed`s solutions provided the ideal product set in this space.
"Riverbed offers superior technology that has a natural fit with our identified growth areas within the enterprise space and we believe that the addition of this range of solutions can add value for our customers. We strongly feel that local businesses will be eager to explore technologies that can provide the opportunities for cost savings through cutting bandwidth costs and increasing efficiencies and productivity," he concludes.
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